The joys of motherhood are well sung. (Yes, we know they grow up fast. Yes, they are so precious at this age.) But what about the not-so-rosy moments? Let’s be honest ““ life with a newborn is boot camp with less sleep and a more ruthless drill sergeant. There are no real “how-tos” other than to hang in there and know you’re not alone. So with that in mind, here are a few gripes newly minted moms might recognize.

you are experiencing a new-found kinship with the overly anxious, the recently broken up, grad students and ravers

Having a newborn is like pulling an all-nighter ““ for six months in a row. As Dr. Leanna Zozula, a Montreal-based psychologist specializing in pregnancy and postpartum mental health, says, “until you live it, you can’t prepare for the lack of sleep.” She suggests sleeping when your baby does. But sometimes you’re so wound up and overtired that when you finally get a chance to nap, you just lie awake thinking, I must sleep now, this is my only chance ever, oh, God, I can’t fall asleep…argh!

you suddenly feel as though you can relate to the life of a conjoined twin

Having a baby stuck to your chest most of the day and night tends to wipe out any initial romantic notions you may have had about unstructured time away from the office. You might not be finding the time to write a grocery list—let alone that novel you’ve been percolating. “I’ve never had so much time away from work,” says Jackie Pye, a mother of two from Dunedin, Ont., “but zero time to myself.”

you sometimes feel as if you’re living with Johnny Cash after a bender

Leah Ralph of Victoria remembers walking on eggshells when her daughter Aurora was a young baby with colic. “I tiptoed around her and her moods. It was really hard not to get caught up in her emotions. If she was having a bad day, I was having a bad day.”

you’ve begun to read again (yeah!), if the diaper-service newsletter and your digital camera manual count…

Lack of stimulation over large chunks of time, particularly while shipwrecked on the couch breastfeeding, can be a problem—especially if you’re used to a fast-paced working life. While getting out helps, what you’ll now consider a big event can come as a bit of a shock. Dr. Zozula recalls a client who “couldn’t get out of her head how uninteresting motherhood could be. Instead of having board meetings with top executives, she was spending her afternoons at Wal-Mart.”

Some women turn to daytime television for company in the early months, but as Toronto mom Lindsay Oughtred learned, even that little pleasure can eventually be co-opted by your baby. “Once Nico neared 11 months we started to fight over our programs—it was Oprah versus Dora.”

you heard breastfeeding was going to melt the baby weight away, but your man-sized appetite is pretty much ensuring it won’t.

My partner calls the time he found me leaning in the fridge spooning up a bowl of cream cheese icing my “Cathy moment,” after the cartoon character who’s always binging and dieting. One mother I spoke with at a Toronto mom-and-baby yoga class could relate: “I used to have emergency nuts and a chocolate bar on me at all times,” she said. “But I had to go cold turkey on the sweets. I can’t even get my arm into my old jeans.”

you irritatingly go blank when former colleagues you bump into ask what you’re working on these days

“I’m responsible for a human life, what are you working on?” says Leah Ralph, with a laugh. Alas, just as leaving the house in sweats virtually guarantees you’ll run into your ex, sleep deprivation ensures that your brain will delete all current events and snappy comebacks when you see people from work. But take heart: you’ll soon forget all about it.